As a
stay-at-home mother of 2 young children, the most important thing to me right
now is to guide my children through a happy childhood, filled with simple
memories and carefree days. I’m not one
to shield them from difficult situations because I know these things
are just as, if not more important in helping them grow into healthy, happy adults. I’m also not perfect, so at any given moment
you might find me laughing and playing with them, calmly letting them make huge
messes in the name of “artistic expression” while at another, giving them the
guilt-trip of the century because they had the gall to ask for “something else
to eat” when I’d just gotten comfortable on the couch with a cup of
coffee. All in all though, I try my
hardest to see the world through their eyes and do what I can to weave a rich
childhood for them.
One of my
greatest wishes as a parent is that somehow, mixed in with the fun, carefree
stuff, I will also somehow be able to instill in my kids a sense of
responsibility to those less fortunate than themselves. If you are like me and my husband, you
struggle every day with making ends meet and not letting the stresses involved
with that struggle affect your kids so much that they can’t enjoy
themselves. My husband is in graduate
school and I take care of the kids at home, so we have zero income and are
living almost completely off of loans.
We qualify for and take advantage of government assistance in order to
ease the grocery bill burden and quell the “no insurance” fear. In our life
right now, “disposable income” is almost laughably unattainable. For us, it would be easy to feel like
victims. However, I’ve never been so
blind to reality that I haven’t been able to recognize that we actually do have
it pretty good. Most importantly we have
each other, but we are also able to buy groceries every week, give into
“impulse buys” occasionally and go on vacations. Granted, all of these “luxuries” come at a
price: our debt steadily climbs along
with our stress with each dollar we spend because it’s ALL borrowed. We are going to have to pay it all back
someday, but luckily someday we will have
the capability to pay it back. This
is a transitional time for us and we are by no means stuck in our situation
unlike so, so many in this country and this world.
There are no
guarantees for any of us. The job market
when my husband is finished with school could be so dismal that he won’t find a
job for a long time. We could spend the
rest of our lives trying to pay off our loans and never be able to build a
“nest egg” for the kids. They will more
than likely learn the value of hard work sooner than some of their peers. It’s highly possible that they will inherit
some of our debt and we have a deep fear that owning a home may never be a real
possibility for us. I don’t want to feel
paralyzed by all of this though, and I don’t want my kids to feel deprived
because they most certainly are not. We
parents have to be careful with how we perceive our lives because these amazing
kids of ours pick up on everything.
Don’t want your child to feel like a victim? Well, you’d better be sure you don’t. One of the best ways I’ve found so far to
combat this tendency to feel helpless is to find ways to give back that involve
little to no money. We’ve done it by
rallying friends and neighbors and coming up with projects to do together with
the kids like baking homemade goodies for our local firefighters, making
homemade blankets for needy children from materials in the remnants bin at the
fabric store, volunteering for the local food drive and holding a bake sale to
raise money for the Red Cross. We’ve
dubbed our group “Little Heroes” and word is quickly spreading around town to
other families who have also spent time wondering how to give back when we are
all struggling ourselves.
So please, don’t
wait. Don’t hold back. Reach out and help a neighbor move their
furniture or take out their garbage, bake cookies for the new family on the
block, volunteer at a soup kitchen, organize a bake sale, put yourself out
there and find out if there are people around you who need a little nudge and
become an unstoppable team…and do it all with your kids. If we show our kids that banding together and
helping others is something we can do no matter where we are in life, then
maybe they will grow into the kind of adults we all admire now. Let’s instill these altruistic values into
our children as they grow so that for them, doing something for someone else
doesn’t have to take courage and conviction it’s just what they will do because
it’s what it means to be human. Every
little bit counts.
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